Reasons to Celebrate

We made it back to Tacna safe and sound on Friday and spent the weekend cleaning out all the dust that accumulated in our apartment while we were gone, buying food and cooking for ourselves for the first time after our two weeks of traveling, doing laundry and getting organized. 

We were welcomed back by several of our friends here, and many of the Peruvians were very excited because a Peruvian movie had been nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign language film category.  This was the first time in history that a Peruvian film had been nominated. The movie, "La Teta Asustada", (The Milk of Sorrow) was shown on Peruvian TV on Sunday immediately before the Oscars, and was artsy and interesting, if sad.  Since we don't have a TV, we went over to a friend's house to see it.  When the Oscars coverage started, it was sort of surreal, because they had the main feed from the US, along with local reporters in Lima and in the small hometown of the main actress in the movie, reporting on how excited everyone was.  The movie unfortunately did not win, but it was still a big deal to have been nominated, I suppose.

We had even more reason to be excited yesterday, because JP found out that he has been accepted to Creighton's Med School.  This is one of his top three schools, and I liked Omaha more than I had expected when we visited in January, so we are very thankful to have his first MD acceptance and we can see how other things shake out in the next few months while knowing we have a great option that would definitely work for us.  So yay!

And, yesterday was International Women's Day, which I have never celebrated, but seems to be a slightly bigger deal at school.  The women teachers greeted me by saying, "Feliz Día" (Happy Day!), for Women's Day, and when we had our afternoon planning meetings the principal bought roses and the male teachers gave them out to all the women teachers. We also had pizza, soda, and ice cream in celebration, so nothing to complain about. 

We both are glad to be back and feel that we have some good projects coming up as the school year starts.  We just wanted to share all the good news we have found out and will work on pictures and trip stories later in the week!